Empire State of guns

“We can overpower the extremists with intelligence and with reason and with common sense, and that’s what we’re going to do.” – Andrew M. Cuomo

There is a political hero in New York. Tuesday night, he spoke truth to power and abided by his conscience in demanding the best for his constituents. He rose humbly above the abattoir din of political games to speak truth we all needed to hear. His name is Greg Ball, and he is a suburban Republican member of the New York state senate.

On that Tuesday night, Andrew Cuomo celebrated the signing of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Some measures, such as better background checks, new mental health policies, and safe storage requirements, are sensible. (Whether or not they’ll “work” is another matter.) Less sensible measures ban certain cosmetic features of popular long rifles (which killed a grand total of five people statewide in 2011) and force owners of common “high-capacity” magazines to sell them out of state or face a misdemeanor.

On Wednesday, President Obama announced that he will follow the lead of gun-control interests in talking a big game about gun violence while offering “sensible” bans on “military-style” accessories. Because, presumably, fewer children would be dead in Newtown if only the shooter didn’t have a pistol grip and flash suppressor or had been forced to use the extra magazines (see: Columbine) and handguns (see: Virginia Tech) he brought with him. The president’s disappointing show might have been worth it, however, to witness unrepentant gun criminal David Gregory pontificate on MSNBC about the need to enforce tougher gun laws — like the kind he ignored.

At any rate, I’ve previously noted that the category of “assault weapon” is invidiously clever political fiction. If you don’t understand why thereis no such thing as an “assault weapon,” then stop and click on the preceding links. Go through their material, as though saving lives through knowledge and effectively reasoned action is of paramount importance to you, and come back.

I’ll wait.

Assuming we’re now all on the same page, the operative point is quite simple. As David Kopel succinctly puts it:

“Today in America, most handguns are semi-automatics, as are many long guns, including the best-selling rifle today, the AR-15, the model used in the Newtown shooting. Some of these guns look like machine guns, but they do not function like machine guns.”

In case you’ve come away from all those facts surprised or uncomfortable, you are probably wondering: Why, if “assault weapons” are not essentially different from other guns, are they favored by recent mass shooters? I’ll answer that question by way of another: Why are sedans (or a given type of sedans) the favored cars of homicidally reckless drivers?

Is it because certain sedans are speedway-style racecars that have no place outside a NASCAR track? Is it because some of them have too much fuel in a single tank? Of course not. The very idea of blaming certain cars, accessories, or fuel levels for criminal stupidity is contemptibly absurd. The reason sedans are commonly used in reckless driving is because sedans are the car of choice of most drivers, responsible or otherwise. Likewise, the AR-15 is the rifle of choice for most Americans, law-abiding or otherwise, so they tend to be used in mass shootings.